The swelling increase in the volume of business mail and the ascendingly high expenditures involved in the preparation and handling of such mail prior to actual distribution require circumvention of manual preparation and handling practices. It is understandable that automation of such practices has virtually become a universally desired objective for all mail enterprises regardless of mail volume.
Automatically controlled preparation of mail for these purposes has been developing toward a reformation of the letter-like item and away from the commonly manufactured envelope filled with enclosures. Envelope-like items are being manufactured, often together with corresponding enclosures, by automatic practices ranging from raw, unprinted sheet matter to finished, product-of press ready for mailing. Such practices may include preprinting of the sheet material, folding, bonding, sealing and perforating for effortless opening of the envelope-like item by the addressee or recipient.
Prior art machinery for the folding and sealing of single, preprinted sheets into mailable letter-like objects, known as self-mailers, includes a system disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,048,809 issued Sep. 17, 1991 to Tebbe, et al. In this arrangement, a sheet folding and sealing apparatus includes a feed mechanism for seriatim feed of sheets along a feed-and-fold path while continuous beads of adhesive are applied along lateral edges of each sheet by a first adhesive applicator. The sheets are fed to a buckle feeding mechanism for forming one or more transverse folds in the sheets while transversely-spaced spots of adhesive are applied by a second adhesive applicator to transverse edges or a transverse fold that abuts a fold pan stop. The folding mechanism has its input and output on one side of the folder and first and second fold pans on the opposite side. The folder also includes folding and sealing rolls that mutually bond and seal folded-over portions of the transversely-folded sheets to close and seal the sheet into a letter-like object. The letter-like objects are then perforated so that tearing along perforation lines removes strips of material which include the adhesively-bonded regions to facilitate opening.
While the above-described structure purports to provide a compact, high speed folding and sealing apparatus with a minimum of components, its construction continues to be less than desirable because of the inherent dispensing of liquid adhesive which occasionally presents problems of dispenser clogging, dripping or insufficient adhesive, and undesirable streaking, smearing or trailing of glue along the sheet surfaces. Such difficulties have resulted in the mutual sticking of the letter-like objects or self-mailers during stacking and subsequent handling and can require costly downtime and replacement of the attendant mail preparation equipment.
Prior art systems of the type described above, are also disadvantageous because of their inflexibility. For example, even though the prior art discloses a method for sheet folding and sealing to produce letter-like objects from single sheets of preprinted material, there is no provision of computer-controlled production of demographically sorted, customized mail products. This flexibility is important in satisfying the demands of a particular market or geographical destination. For instance, it may be desirable to offer certain recipients or readers various features of selected advertising depending upon their special interests, income or occupation. Likewise, it may be relevant to customize products or services contingent upon a reader's previous history. For instance, one reader may receive a brochure advertising a business seminar for improving writing skills for secretaries, while that reader's neighbor may receive a different brochure advertising the basics of discrimination law. In each situation, the seminar sponsor may choose to provide customized information on the mail product before it is folded and sealed.
In addition, it is desirable that mail products be processed in order to take maximum advantage of postal discounts. For example, substantial discounts are offered by the U.S. Postal Service for bar coding letter mail. A first-class letter that is properly bar coded and presorted qualifies for a 5.7 cent per piece discount. A third-class letter meeting the same qualifications can earn 5.2 cent per piece discount or a 3 cent per piece discount for non-profit third-class letters. Accordingly, it is preferable that a system process mail products in an order that facilitates presorting and packaging to optimize postal discounts. In this regard, it would be advantageous in some instances if a plurality of mail products could be assembled and customized during a given production run to facilitate grouping the various mail products destined for a given carrier route. Therefore, it is desirable that current mail preparation systems offer a greater degree of customization improving upon the sortation of the mail products to be customized and permit various mail products to be processed during a single production run for readers in a given postal zone irrespective of varying points of customization.